I've been supporting over 80 MediaWiki wikis and half a dozen or so Wordpress blogs at Intuit, Inc. I started out on a couple of old Dell PCs with Mandrake. When they were overloaded, and that didn't take too long, I moved to an HP DL360 XEON Dual Processor server with 4 gig of RAM, redundant BIOS, 37 gig RAID 1, etc... A nice box.

So when the need arose to setup a server for another group, I dusted off one of those old Dells and decided to figure out how to do it right - with all the latest versions of Apache, MySQL and PHP, and all working together nicely. It took me a few days to figure out, but I finally have a clean, working system.

They walk you through each step of the way, explaining what to get, where to get it from, how to install it, and what needs to be configured to get it all playing nicely together. They compile the PHP with a lot of extensions enabled - some not really needed by "normal" installs - but it's always good to have options. By the end, you should have a nice, fully-functional installation with a working web server that groks PHP.]]>